No, it’s not an alien colony, a time machine, or even a Russian version of America’s ionospheric HAARP program. But in a forest near Moscow, this Soviet-era “lightning machine” has a capacity arguably equal to Russia’s entire electricity output.

Bloggers flock to see this technical marvel, which has been
dubbed the “High Voltage Marx and Tesla Generators Research
Facility.” The testing range, a branch of the Russian Electrical
Engineering Institute, is in the sleepy town of Istra, 40
kilometers west of Moscow.

It is situated in a relatively small forest next to the New
Jerusalem Monastery on the edge of town.

The secret, open-air, high-voltage testing device was constructed
in the late 1970s for testing insulators to protect vehicles,
aircrafts and electronic equipment against lightning.

The facility is absolutely unique; nothing like it exists
anywhere in the world, primarily because of its outstanding
charge capacity. At its peak operating capacity the giant Marx
generator, when lightning is discharged onto an isolated
platform, has power equal to all power generation facilities in
Russia – including thermoelectric, hydroelectric, nuclear, solar,
and wind power stations combined. But only for about 100
microseconds, Rossiya-1 TV reported.

The Marx Generator was named after German electrical engineer
Erwin Otto Marx, who described it back in 1924. In Russia it’s
known as the Arkadyev-Marx generator, as Russian physicist
Vladimir Arkadyev and his co-worker, renowned scientific film
director Nikolay Baklin, constructed a so-called “lightning
machine” 10 years earlier, in 1914.

The test bench discharges a lightning of a desired capacity on a
special heavily isolated platform, on which a device or a
material being tested is placed. The platform is full of sensors
showing how exactly the electric discharge affected the tested
object.

When the facility is operating, the static charge in the “hot
zone” is so large that the hair of anyone present bristles. In a
TV report made for Rossiya-1 TV, staff said that once a nosy
observer intruded into the facility and entered the testing
ground right in the middle of a experiment, when condensers were
charged to the maximum.

“God only knows how this guy remained alive and wasn’t struck
by a discharge,” said Vladimir Sysoev, a leading research
worker at the facility.

Others say that lightning is still a matter for deep exploration,
and that several trees burned to a crisp around the test bench
serve as a reminder that lightning is very hard to control.

The Istra research center has conducted many tests since Soviet
times. Among the latest carried out were lightning protection
tests for Russia’s Sukhoi Superjet aircraft.

As the facility is really expensive to operate, it is only turned
on for special occasions.

Unlike the famous High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program
(HAARP) facility in the US, the Marx generator in Istra was never
meant to modulate the weather, yet like HAARP it was involved in
designing weapons for the future.

Next to the research facility there is another test center,
called “Allure.” It is a stationary simulator of the
electromagnetic pulse (EMP) needed to test the sturdiness of
military and civilian aviation hardware to impulse
electromagnetic fields of a natural and artificial nature.

An EMP created by a nuclear explosion is capable of terminally
damaging
electronic equipment, so the capability of creating an
artificial EMP, particularly without exploding a nuclear device,
is valuable in a military sense. That’s why an EMP weapon is a
general’s dream in any country.

The Allure complex was set to become a part of a grandiose
scientific building, with a dome 118.4 meters high and 236.5
meters wide, but when the construction was nearly ready, the
behemoth structure imploded, collapsing on the early morning of
Jan. 25, 1985. The building was never reconstructed, though its
circular base could be seen from space (coordinates 55° 55’ 8”N,
+36° 49’ 7”E).

Though the dome crumbled because of mistakes in its construction,
the collapse had unintended historical consequences.

The high-ranking Soviet Communist Party official in Moscow
supervising the construction of the Istra dome was fired from his
job and sent to a remote posting as punishment.

He was replaced with fellow Communist apparatchik Boris Yeltsin,
who was invited to work in Moscow and eventually became Russia’s
first president.